Roger Harrison, Arab News Staff

JEDDAH/BAGHDAD, 12 March 2004 — The military forces in Iraq will be under the control of a four-star US general even after the official end of the occupation. Under him, a three-star American general will be in charge of operations. Britain’s place in the command structure will be as deputy to the senior officer.

According to the BBC, a senior British official said on Wednesday that American and British forces will remain in Iraq “for at least two years.” Authorized by the interim government they will form part of a multinational force for which a UN Security Council mandate will be sought in May.

Members of the new government are likely to be selected by the end of April, in time for a new UN Council resolution approving the planned handover to Iraq’s interim government on June 30.

The multinational security force will have a unified military command and will incorporate the new Iraqi army and the Iraqi civil defense force. The Iraqi police force is not expected to be part of the structure.

Meanwhile, assailants shot dead two Iraqi women working for a US contractor and Iraqi police identified yesterday the men arrested for the murder of two US nationals as police officers.

A US soldier and an Iraqi civilian were killed in separate roadside bombings, the military said yesterday, while, for the first time, a top US general complained about the Pentagon’s failure to fully equip Iraqi security forces.

The US-led coalition also announced that an autopsy performed on detained Palestinian militant Abu Abbas, the brains behind the 1985 hijacking of an Italian cruise ship, confirmed he died of heart disease on Monday.

Police in the Shiite holy city of Karbala confirmed yesterday that six men arrested in connection to the killing of two US government employees and their interpreter were police officers. “They are from our police department. They are suspected of being involved. The case is under investigation, but they are innocent until proved guilty,” Karbala police spokesman Rahman Al-Mussawi Diab told AFP.

Two US citizens, employed by the Coalition Provisional Authority and their female interpreter, were shot dead by men in police uniform late Tuesday night as they headed to their offices in Hilla, 100 kilometers south of Baghdad.

Diab identified the men as belonging to Karbala’s drug division and said they had traveled to Hilla tracking a criminal gang. US investigators said the message was disturbing if the policemen, in fact, turned out to be the killers.

Two Iraqi women employed by a unit of US oil field services company Halliburton were shot dead late Wednesday in Basra as they returned home from work. “The assailants stopped their car and shot them dead,” said coalition spokesman Dominic d’Angelo yesterday of the women, employed as laundresses by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root.

An Iraqi was killed and two wounded yesterday when a bomb meant for a US military convoy exploded in the flash point town of Fallujah, police said. And A US soldier was killed and two wounded in a bomb attack outside of Baquba, 50 kilometers north of Baghdad, a US military officer said.

— Additional input from agencies